The Case of Nanguan Music in Postwar Taiwan

Amateur Music Clubs and State Intervention/Wang Ying-fen 95 Amateur Music Clubs and State Intervention: The Case of Nanguan Music in Postwar Taiwan Wang Ying-fen Associate Professor National Taiwan University Graduate Institute of Musicology Abstract: Amateur music clubs had been an integral part of the communal life in traditional Taiwan society. They constituted the main vehicle through which traditional art forms had been transmitted from generation to generation. In post-war Taiwan, however, amateur music clubs experienced serious decline. This was partly due to the Nationalist government’s cultural policy to promote Western and Chinese art forms and downgrade local Taiwanese culture, and partly due to the rapid westernization, modernization, industrial- ization, and urbanization that Taiwan society had undergone. In the 1970s, with the change of the political climate both internationally and domestical- ly, the Nationalist government began to pay attention to local culture and to implement a series of projects to promote traditional arts. Among the art forms promoted, nanguan music stood out as one of the best supported due to its high social status, neutral political position, and academic value as recognized by foreign and domestic scholars. State intervention in nanguan started in 1980 and gradually increased its intensity until it reached its peak level in the second half of the 1990s. It has brought many resources to nanguan clubs, but it has also contributed to the deterioration of the nanguan community both in its musical quality and its members' integrity as amateur musicians. Based on my personal involvement in nanguan, I aim to document in this paper the state intervention in nanguan in the past two decades and to examine its impact on nanguan. I argue that the past two decades of state intervention in nanguan has fallen short of its goal to preserve and transmit nanguan mainly because its modes of intervention did not take into consideration the nature of nanguan as a pastime for self-cultivation among amateur musicians. I will also argue that such a failure can be further traced back to the lack of understanding about local traditional culture in Taiwan society as a result of the Nationalist government’s policy to uphold Western and national art forms while downgrading local ones. Key words: cultural policy, state intervention, postwar Taiwan, nanguan, amateur music clubs. 96 Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore 141 2003.9 I. Introduction Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1983, I went to Longshan Temple in Lukang , a historic town in Changhua County in mid-Taiwan and well known for its nanguan (literally “southern pipes”) tradition. I entered the wide-open space of the quiet, empty temple ground, and soon my attention was captured by the sound of nanguan pipa (four-stringed plucked lute). I fol- lowed it to another part of the temple ground. Then I saw two very old men, sitting in chairs, with their eyes half closed. One was playing a nanguan pipa and the other playing an erxian , the nanguan two-stringed fiddle. After the piece ended, the two remained silent. Soon, the pipa player started playing again, and the erxian player joined in naturally without asking which piece it was. The two continued on leisurely as if the music would never end, and life was just as simple and quiet as the music. Later I learned that the two old men were respectively in their 80s and 90s and belonged to Juying she , the nanguan music group that had been part of the temple for almost a century. This was one of my first encounters with nanguan music clubs, and the leisurely, quiet atmosphere of the whole scene made a lasting impression on me. Two years ago, I went to the temple again. The sound of nanguan was still there, but, instead of the quiet music played leisurely by the two old men, this time it was a group of young students singing nanguan together and led by two nanguan teachers. The singing was a bit chaotic and out of tune, but the teachers did not stop them, and the singing continued on. Without asking, I knew that this was another nanguan training course sponsored by the state. These two snapshots of nanguan activities in the same temple almost twenty year apart reflected more or less how nanguan in Taiwan has been transformed from a leisurely pastime of amateur music clubs to a cultural heritage promoted by the state through widespread training courses and other means of intervention. Such state intervention in nanguan started around 1980 and gradually increased in intensity until its recent peak level during the second Amateur Music Clubs and State Intervention/Wang Ying-fen 97 half of the 1990s. It has brought many resources to nanguan clubs, but it has also contributed to the deterioration of the nanguan community both in terms of its musical quality and its members’ pride and identity as amateur musicians. Based on my personal involvement in nanguan as a researcher since 1983 and in state-funded projects on nanguan since 1993,1 I aim to document in this paper the state intervention in nanguan in the past two decades and to examine its impact on nanguan. I will argue that the past two decades of state intervention in nanguan has failed to help preserve and transmit nanguan mainly because its modes of intervention did not take into consideration the nature of nanguan music as a self-cultivating pastime of amateur musicians. I will also argue that such a failure can be further traced back to the lack of understanding about local traditional culture on the part of cultural officials and scholars as a result of the Nationalist (also known as KMT) government’s policy to uphold Western and national art forms while downgrading local traditional arts.2 Even though scholars have made sporadic observations about the negative effects of state intervention on Taiwanese traditional arts,3 there has been little systematic research on the subject either 1. I was the producer of a state-commissioned nanguan recording project in 1993-94, the organizer of a nanguan conference as part of the first state-run nanguan art festival in 1994, and have been a reviewing committee member for the National Center for Traditional Arts since since around 1998. 2. In this article, “national art forms” refer to the various genres that were brought to Taiwan by mainland Chinese after 1945 and subsequently promoted by the Nationalist government as “national culture,” while “local traditional arts” refer to the traditional art forms of the aborigines (the original inhabitants of the island) and those of the southern Fujianese and Hakka people who emigrated to Taiwan in large numbers beginning in the 17th century. 3. So far Qiu Kunliang is probably the only scholar that has written most fre- quently about how state intervention has damaged traditional arts since the early 1980’s. Most of these writings, however, were short essays published in newspa- pers and popular magazines and republished in his collections of essays (see Qiu 1980, 1984, 1992, 1997a, 1997b, 1999, 2003). Lü Chuikuan in his recent review of the state of traditional music in Taiwan, a government-commissioned project, pointed out the negative influence brought by state intervention in nanguan and other traditional music (see Lü 2002:passim). Lin Gufang wrote 98 Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore 141 2003.9 by researchers in cultural policy or those in traditional arts in Taiwan. Although Su Kuei-chi’s dissertation (2002) provides us with a comprehensive overview of the Nationalist government’s arts policy in postwar Taiwan, it mainly focused on how the policy influenced Peking Opera and gezaixi (native opera sung in Taiwanese) and does not deal with its effect on other Taiwanese operatic or musical genres. To fill this gap, I have relied on primary and secondary sources to sort out the state projects on traditional arts in general and on nanguan in particular, to examine their fund- ing and operation, and to analyze the problems incurred by these projects. The primary sources consulted include governmental publi- cations, unpublished project reports, concert programs, writings by cultural officials, interviews with cultural officials and staff members, interviews with musicians, and my own involvement and observa- tion. In addition, I have consulted previous research on state cultural policy in Taiwan (such as Hsiau 1991, 2000; Li [1988] 1992; Su 1992; Winckler 1994; Su 1998; Su 2001; Su 2002) to put state intervention in nanguan in a larger historical and political context. In the following account, I will first give an overview of the nature of amateur music clubs and outline the history of the state cultural policy under the Nationalist government’s rule in postwar Taiwan. Then I will propose the reasons for nanguan’s favourable position in gaining state patronage. Next, I will divide the past two decades of state intervention in nanguan into four stages and dis- cuss the modes of intervention in each of them. Finally, I will sum- about the problem of state subsidies and the role of scholars as cultural brokers (Lin [ 1991]1995). Chou Chiener discussed how cultural policy and scholarly intervention changed the identity of nanguan music in Taiwan (Chou in press). Wu Huohuang , a nanguan musician and an amateur researcher, observed how state-run nanguan activities lost the spontaneous interaction among nanguan musicians in their traditional activities (Wu 2000). Similar opinions were expressed by Fan Yangkun concerning state intervention in beiguan (literally “northern pipes”) music (Fan 2002:198). In addition, Belinda Chang analysed how cultural policy and political ideology influenced the development of gezaixi in Taiwan (Chang 1997).

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